One Drop Became An Ocean

Charles Denler

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it’s hard to imagine Charles Denler’s latest pieces unfolding beneath titles more appropriate than the ones they currently bear. “A Fair Wind Home,” “Dancing Light”—each suits the delicate melodies that Denler delineates on piano and that The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra transforms into shimmering panoramas. If, however, alternate titles are ever required, something suggestive of Ennio Morricone (instead of “Whispering Seas”) or Erik Satie (instead of “Ice Crystals” or “Catching Rain”) deserves serious consideration.

Life Without Sound

Cloud Nothings

Dylan Baldi and his mates have their own sound—a drum-pounding, shredded-guitar attack from within which Baldi shouts himself hoarse. But it’s the hooky racket that they make when they let their conscious or subconscious influences show that makes this record special. “Modern Act” picks up where The Replacements left off. “Internal World” pays homage to Tom Verlaine. And when in “Realize My Fate” Baldi declares, “I believe in something bigger, but what, I can’t articulate,” the pounding, the shredding, and the shouting make perfect sense.

Truly Madly Deeply

Relient K

This good-and-still-getting-better band released these three Valentine’s Day songs on Feb. 12. They sound neither like each other nor like leftovers from last year’s wonderful Air for Free. On “Candy Hearts,” loud-fast rules. The acoustic “BMI Valentine” has a second verse that begins “I know it doesn’t hurt to have an awesome second verse.” Sandwiched between the two is “Happy Valentimes.” The rhythm filters John Lee Hooker through ZZ Top. The melody and lyrics, believe it or not, could make Paul Simon jealous.

The Wilderness

Joel Willoughby

Willoughby released this EP last fall, but it makes ideal Lent listening. He sings “One Month & Ten Days” from the point of view of Jesus in the desert, and, one song later, he calls out the fools who say in their hearts that there is no God. In the final two, he tries to go home again only to find out that, not unlike the kingdom of heaven, the desert is within him. His silky vocals and the melancholy pop hooks toward which he makes beelines provide the oases.

ENCORE

Jessi Colter recorded the 12 selections on her “new” album, The Psalms (Sony Legacy) in 2007 and 2008. Whatever Sony’s reasons for sitting on the results, the musician-historian Lenny Kaye, the project’s producer, has used the intervening years wisely, enhancing Colter’s piano-and-voice improvisations on KJV translations of the Psalms with overdubbed instruments and (on “Psalm 21 Be Thou Exalted”) vocals.

The improvisations are mostly musical. The texts themselves Colter sings practically verbatim. And, the genre in which she and her late husband Waylon Jennings achieved fame notwithstanding, there’s nothing particularly “country” about the finished product—not the melodies, not Colter’s no-frills alto, not Kaye’s NYC-honed atmospheric sense. Only “Psalm 23 The Lord Is My Shepherd” sounds at all like a potential worship-music hit, and CCM is nowhere on the horizon. So what is The Psalms? Experimental folk art rooted in the conviction that the Word of the Lord shall not return unto Him void. —A.O.